The Eternal Battle
Compromise. It’s what we do when we come face to face with other people with differing views or actions. We compromise with our family. We compromise with our coworkers and bosses. We even compromise with strangers at a door when we cede to let them enter a building ahead of us! Some, throughout history, have said that no compromise is the best solution for ending conflict. This includes men and women of all walks, but is perhaps most pertinent amongst the military. Much strategy in warfare is about beating your opponent down or outfoxing them until surrender is forced.
Of course, some war mongrels will take this to its furthest end, pursuing no submission of any kind. For most, even in militarized conflict, there is always a compromise at the end of the road. Major wars, wherein there is a decisive victor, end in treaties that became talking points in history books. But what if there is no bodily war? What if the conflict is purely ideological, a battle of wits, hearts, and minds? What if the battle is for the soul?
This is the conflict forged by the dispute between theists and atheists. To the atheist, nothing matters. We are byproducts of chemicals and atoms that, through an inconsequential and unnecessary process lasting eons of time, became absurdly self-centered creatures capable of contemplating about our own existence, contrary to all other animals. We are bags of meat floating on a rock hurtling in space incapable of doing anything not programmed by our own chemicals and possessing no free will. We have no choice but to await the heat death of the universe.
Sounds depressing, doesn’t it? It’s also philosophically and scientifically unsound. The atheist is beholden to the self-defeating beliefs of materialism and evolution. They cannot allow a “divine foot in the door” because it would upset their naturalistic just-so stories (Richard Lewontin, geneticist, Marxist, and defender of evolutionary biology). In their system, molecules-to-man is the only acceptable answer and they must say so because “in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs…we have a prior commitment to materialism.”
But if we’re nothing but processes standing on processes in the midst of processes, why bother trying to persuade anyone of anything? The atheist concludes that he has no free will, yet it is his assumption that he can persuade others to agree with his beliefs. But according to materialism, there are no beliefs, just the end results of biological mechanisms. A person has no choice but the choice they make. The idea is ridiculous, ludicrously dim, and historically a millennia(s)-old undependable ideology. By its own nature, it has no defense.
The theist (and in particular the Christian) can point to reasons for their beliefs. Why is the universe something rather than nothing? God created it as an expression of His will, to house His subjects. Why do we think and make choices about our daily lives? Because He has given us Free Will, so that we may come to Him through our own reasons rather than because He forces us to love or worship Him. Why is there so much pain and suffering in the world? Because we have sinned, besmirched His name, and are fallen. We brought death into this world. We are responsible for the verifiable entropy seen in all living and nonliving things.
Why? Because we trusted the adversary (Satan) instead of Him Who Is and Always Has Been. We chose false gods, just as the atheists do now in their love of fanciful just-so stories and images about “mother earth” and “ape ancestors.” They paint pictures of head-scratching transformations unsubstantiated by the fossil record, recording unbelievable paleoartist depictions as fact. To this day (at least as far as I attended school only a few years ago), known hoaxes and grand claims are brandied about in science classrooms as proof of evolution (Haeckal’s embryos, peppered moths, skull lineups). Indoctrination begins and ends in the secular classroom.
This battle of ideologies, I would say, is a war for the very soul of mankind. It is blatantly a facet of the devil’s plans, to corrupt the minds of youth. If he can convince you that God does not exist, then, naturally, he does not either. Even with the foreknowledge of his own defeat, the fallen angel seeks to take many with him, to make them spurn God. These are the actions of a desperate, deplorable, despicable being who is aided by his witless servants.
Though they do not know it, “[they] are of [their] father the Devil, and [they] want to carry out [their] father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and has not stood in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks from his own nature, because he is a liar and the father of liars.” (John 8:44, words in brackets added by me for correct grammar, HCSB) Though Jesus was speaking to the Jews who did not believe in Him on this matter, it is readily applicable to the atheists and their actions in the world.
But there is hope still yet. The Good News is eternal and everlasting. “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in Me, even if he dies, will live. Everyone who lives and believes in Me will never die.” (John 11:25-26 HCSB)
For your soul, there can be no compromise.
